Month: September 2008

Louis CK has a new stand-up comedy concert film (why aren’t we calling it a special? foreshadowing!) debuting on Showtime on Saturday, Oct. 4. It’s called Chewed Up and refers to a NSFW part of anatomy, and anyone familiar with CK knows that his brutally honest comedy is also quite brutally funny. More than a few people, including Ricky Gervais, have called him the best American stand-up comedian working today. I’m not going to disagree with that. Louis CK can walk onstage and just talk about whatever is on his mind and you’ll find yourself laughing along with him, and as he told me earlier today, that’s an integral part of his writing process. What do I mean by that? Read on, my friends. Read on. First, a clip! Not Safe For Work, obviously: OK. Louis CK has divulged a lot of great insight into his own life, work and comedy in the past couple of months to such folks as XM’s Unmasked, The Sound of Young America (audio embedded after the jump), and A Special Thing. I wanted to get his thoughts on the fact that his longtime friend and comedy partner, Chris Rock, also tackled the nature of the words "fa&&ot" and "ni&&er" in his new special, but CK told me he hadn’t seen Rock’s HBO special yet. So that will have to wait. But talking about...

Sometimes, all blogs that share a love of funny things can agree to love the same funny thing, even when we know we’re making PR people feel even better about their jobs. Such is the case with me and my friends at Dead-Frog and Videogum, in that we all want to share these clips that are featured as extras for the 30 Rock season 2 DVD collection coming out next week. The Emmy-winner for outstanding comedy returns for season 3 on Oct. 30, 2008. Because, really, watching the cast at a table read for last season’s finale, "Cooter," lets you know how good the writing is: And we missed out, as many did, on the special Writers Guild strike edition live staging of an episode at the UCB Theatre, so we can relive that here,...

I recently got on the phone with the boys from God’s Pottery. You can read part of our chat in print in today’s New York City edition of the Metro newspaper, in advance of their Thursday, Oct. 2, show here at Comix. Or you can read all of it, right here, right now! God’s Pottery made television history this summer as the first comedy duo to compete on NBC’s Last Comic Standing. Make that the first acoustic Christian folk music comedy duo. So who do Jeremiah Smallchild and Gideon Lamb think they are, anyhow? Do they think they’re big shots now? Let’s ask them! What made you decide to enter a televised comedy competition? Jeremiah: "We just went to the New York audition. They said, ‘Why don’t you come on by.’ Maybe they had heard of our Web presence." Gideon: "Or heard us in churches…Sometimes we’ll just be telling a funny story and they’ll be laughing, and then we’ll talk about the Lord." Jeremiah: "I thought they were going to gang up on us. Look at these silly guys talking about Jesus." Gideon: "But they opened up to us." Jeremiah: "Even (celebrity judge) Richard Belzer. He’s Jewish." Gideon: "Half Jewish." Jeremiah: "But he loved us, and…" Gideon: "And I think we’re getting somewhere with him." Here’s a clip from a recent performance, in case you aren’t already familiar with...

Patton Oswalt recently wrote that anyone looking to become a comedian should simply watch Brian Regan: The Epitome of Hyperbole and try doing what Regan does. "You won’t even come close, but your attempt to come close to the pure brilliance that is Brian Regan will, by default, make you a better comedian than you are, or could have been," Oswalt wrote on his MySpace blog earlier this month. "I should know. It’s worked for me." What is it about Brian Regan that sets him apart? Regan doesn’t seek out controversial topics, joking about reading, art, jury duty, TV cooking shows and the like. Nor does he litter his performance with profanity. Rather, he jokes about everyday subjects with an Everyman quality, hunching his body and bobbing his head while darting across the stage (though not as physical now as he was years ago), oftentimes adopting a quintessentially dumb guy approach to observational humor. He jokes about not reading newspaper stories that continue past the front page. He jokes about knowing nothing about art. And whatever he’s joking about, he makes it easily relatable to audiences. As his manager, Rory Rosegarten, says on the DVD, "The audiences embrace him tremendously." While other comedians go into acting in TV and movies, or writing gigs, Regan has continued to pummel premises and tour the country as a stand-up for the past...

I happened to arrive home late Saturday night, but not so late that when I turned on my TV, I couldn’t see a new listing at 1 a.m. Sunday on my local FOX station for something called Bananas. All the info button would tell me: "Taylor Mason 2." Comedy. New. So I had to watch/DVR it. Obviously. Turns out it’s a stand-up comedy showcase series that has been around, at least in the Midwest, for a year or two, but new to the national airwaves. In NYC, it airs on FOX at 1 a.m. Sundays, or right as SNL is ending. Been a few years since we had a post-SNL stand-up comedy showcase (my memory tells me twas an up-and-comers stand-up show filmed in SoCal and hosted by Louie Anderson in the late 1990s). Anyhoosiers. Or should I say, anyohios, as this Bananas Comedy show is filmed at the Funny Bone in Columbus (a faded set of bananas appears on the brick wall behind the stage), and has a particular aim on showcasing clean (and sometimes classified as "Christian") comedians. It’s produced by Guardian Studios, which also sells videos such as Every Man’s Young Battle, which, of course, is all about the temptations of pornography. Where was I? Thor Ramsey hosts the comedy shows. And it makes sense that I first saw the episode featuring Taylor Mason, since Ramsey...